The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Traditional applications have presented user-interfaces for users to interact with and control application functions. These applications were conventionally installed on user owned computer systems. Recently, however, developments in technology have allowed enterprises to deploy such applications via the Internet, World Wide Web (“Web”) or a Local Area Network (“LAN”). These applications, more commonly known as Web applications, are easily accessed and controlled by end-users through the use of a web-browser or other GUI program on the user's computer system which is connected to the Internet or LAN. Such web applications are advantageous in that they do not require each end-user to install the application locally on a computer system. Instead, the application may be accessed remotely through the Internet or LAN, thus saving system resources on the user's local computer system.
In order to deploy web applications, much time and effort is spent on developing graphical display pages for user-interaction. Further, much time and effort must also be spent in tying the display pages to back-end systems such as databases engines. Such display pages of a web application are currently designed using conventional page design tools. Conventional page design tools allow users to design the structure and layout of web pages. However, one drawback of conventional page design tools is their limited flexibility in constructing complex web application elements without requiring much time and effort from a web page designer. For instance, certain complex components, such as dynamic forms and images, cannot be easily created without having a page designer manually write code representing the component. The process of writing and testing the code is usually complex and tedious, and further takes up much valuable resources and time.
Further, the problem is intensified where dynamic objects are integrated with back-end systems as usually requested in web applications. For instance, a page designer utilizing conventional page design tools must also have extensive knowledge of the back-end systems that will be used in the web application. Thus, not only would a page designer need to know how to create and test code representing complex objects, he/she would also need to have extensive knowledge of the back-end system and manually enter and test the complex object code. This process is prone to error and requires that the user have extensive knowledge of back-end systems.
From the above discussion, it is clear that conventional page design tools do not provide adequate results. Thus, an improved mechanism for designing display pages containing complex web application objects is needed.